Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The past is not true

sive.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 362 posts

Re: The past is not true

#151

Post by polygotdomain »

0xCMP wrote: post #126
ideamotor wrote: post #106

We lose this when everything is recorded forever. Stated more eloquently: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336... : “I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead: Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember. We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.”…

Data, information, doesn't rot, but code does because it relies on the implicit promises of the underlying system(s) it runs on top of, the systems it interacts with, and the expectations of it's users. Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital. And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the info…

>Data, information, doesn't rot...

Can you tell me what hieroglyphics mean? What about a phrase of latin or another dead language? Information is only as "fresh" as our ability to interpret and understand it. Dead languagues are the same as a file who's format we no longer have the spec for. Yes, the ones and zeros may still be there, but without the ability to understand what they mean, there's little we can do with that information. We're still at risk of losing those capabilities for data.

Re: The past is not true

#152

Post by pharrington »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #123
_ea1k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it this way, officers see car accidents every day. The majority are cases where someone ran directly into the car in front of them due to inattention. Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed. Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic…

That's very surprising to me. Here in the UK, a serious accident where someone broke their spine would be investigated without a shadow of a doubt. They would want to rule out any criminal culpability.

Yeah, the US in general is extremely cavalier with our car culture. Usually the only police involvement when an accident occurs is when they're called to the scene to take a report of the incident. Afterwards, the parties usually just deal with the aftermath themselves and through insurance companies.

Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.

Re: The past is not true

#153

Post by mike_ivanov »

thenerdhead wrote: post #44

> The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.

That sounds as understanding, not forgiving. I think that when it comes to parents, understanding makes forgiving unnecessary, as there is actually nothing to forgive. Except for the cases of actual, malicious abuse, of course.

Re: The past is not true

#154

Post by throwaway106382 »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #96

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and p…

It doesn't help that a lot of "history" is actually just propaganda, for example the infamous "iron lungs in the gym" photo during the polio pandemic.

Re: The past is not true

#155

Post by sbob »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #124

I don't always fully agree with anecdotal feel good stories that seem to imply a greater universal point due to a by-chance outcome. What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault? It's nicely written, but it speaks to most people's general positivity bias: our yearning for a benign truth underlying all things that are bad, or more specifically, that bad things aren't really r…

> What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault?

In this case his story would have never been written. Thus we get a big survivorship bias to hear only about unlikely events and get some kind of wisdom tidbits from those.

Re: The past is not true

#156

Post by mistermann »

foobarbecue wrote: post #67
mmusson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point. Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady. Whether or not you lear…

Right. The past is true, but your memories are flawed, and your experience is incomplete. You have to make an effort to get the facts right. To get a full understanding of any situation, a good start is to talk to anyone you can who was there when it happened.

The tricky part is: that's also often a good way to get a misunderstanding.

Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people.

People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.

Re: The past is not true

#157

Post by swombat »

A saying that's stayed with me recently is:

> You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable.

Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new things about the past. You can change your stories about it. You can even assist others in doing that.

But the future? That is always out of reach, and already encompasses all your attempts to change it.

Re: The past is not true

#158

Post by sanderjd »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #96

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and p…

I think this is an important lesson for folks struggling with anxiety about what will happen with climate change as well. It is already awful for lots of people and will continue to be, increasingly so to some degree and up to some point, but like it did during Covid and the Cold War and the world wars and the flu pandemic, in aggregate, life will also go on.

But I think it's also important to remember that that's only the case in aggregate. For many many individual people, life did not go on during all these events (and all the other tragedies that are constantly happening), they lost their own lives, or their parents, or their children, or their friends.

I personally find it really hard to hold both of these truths in my head at once.

Re: The past is not true

#160

Post by mistermann »

avgcorrection wrote: post #46
keepamovin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sad that you missed the point. Open up to it man

Thanks for the concern, but I didn’t miss the point. There is no wisdom in extrapolating absolute statements from fringe coincidences.

> There is no wisdom in extrapolating absolute statements from fringe coincidences.

What method did you use to determine this is comprehensively true, in fact, rather than simply intuition?

Post reply on HN